Some Christmas goodies

As I’ve said before, I enjoy giving people gifts for Christmas. There’s just something about finding that perfect gift for someone, and seeing their face light up when they open it. I like giving presents, but I also like getting them, and this year had a few good ones.

Grown-ups can’t play with Legos anymore. (Okay, we can, but people frown on it. Also, they’re so expensive I can never justify buying them for myself. I can’t wait till Squishy is old enough that I can buy him or her Legos so I can play with them.)

Lucky for me, my family has discovered Nano Blocks. They’re like Legos, but less than a quarter in size, meaning they’re way too delicate for clumsy kid fingers to play with. They’re adult toys…ahem…collectibles.

And this year I got a few. First, there’s a Minion.

BANANA!!!

Cute, isn’t he.

And I also got a keyboard, guitar and drumset. Along with the grand piano my sister gave me last year, I have the makings of a band here.

By the way, have you seen The Force Awakens yet? Two years ago the wife gave me the original Star Wars trilogy for Christmas. Lately I’ve had the urge to watch the prequels again (I know – I get weird sometimes), so the wife delivered.

With him, strong the bubbles are.

Between you and me, the Yoda bubble bath is by far the cooler part of this present.

But the award for best Christmas present this year goes to the mother-in-law (with special recognition to the wife who helped her figure out what to give me).

Yes, the mother-in-law, who has never seen a Doctor Who episode in her life, has made me a TARDIS shirt. She has one of those cool computerised embroidery machines, and a nifty little program that allows her to make her own patterns, so she embroidered a TARDIS from a picture the wife had sent her.

As cool as the embroidery is, it really impressed me that she actually got a shirt that fits the theme. And it’s very slimming, but that’s to be expected – it’s bigger on the inside, after all.

I’ve worn it twice already, but no one has freaked out about my TARDIS shirt yet. Doctor Who is not very big in my town, it seems. I think it’s very cool, though, and so does the wife.

Some friends got together to watch through all the Star Wars movies leading up to Episode VII’s release. Apparently I’d started getting more charitable towards the prequels, because they were worse than I remembered; pretty awful!

Thinking about it very briefly (this requires further analysis), I think the problem is that the prequels weren’t written by people with a good grasp of mythology, or at the very least commercial interests won out over the dedication to mythology that shaped the originals. Someone unfamiliar with the original trilogy will probably find it much easier to stomach the prequels. I might just have to conduct an experiment.

You get the coolest custom Doctor Who gifts! I’ve seen almost all of the episodes, been to several conventions, met a number of the cast members and this year I finally received a Doctor Who gift for Christmas. My 9-year-old son created a Lego Tardis console and produced photo instructions so i could assemble it.

There isn’t a reply button down at your last comment to me, so I’m not sure where this one will end up. My son thought it was pretty cool that you are in South Africa (we had a little geography lesson). He asked me to pass along this message: Thank you for saying I’m awesome. The Lego Tardis was hard to make so was the Dalek. My dad really likes Doctor Who so that is why i built it for him.

My 13 year old grandson who has mild Asperger’s is a hoot about Lego’s. His private rule is that a set must be built exactly according to the directions three times before its parts can become a part of the greater universe. He has hundreds of thousands of Lego’s and the two of us play for hours.

I still have some sets I got as a child. I still build them strictly according to the directions, and I store them only partially disassembled so the blocks of any specific set don’t mix with the blocks of any others.

No…I wish Garrett would keep his assembled. Especially the Star Wars sets we’ve bought him. It causes great angst in me to know the Millennium Falcon is mingling with some lame Pirates of the Caribbean set.

My problem is a severe lack of visual creativity combined with perfectionism that borders on the obsessive-compulsive, so those little building plans are non-negotiable to me. Oh, I have some left-over blocks from long-lost sets, and I managed to build stuff I liked from those…and then never took them apart again.

I gave my nieces and nephews a lot of lego for Christmas. The stuff *is* made of platinum inside the plastic, isn’t it? Only way I can figure the price… Anyhow, one of them was a largish-scale Star Wars character, which my nephew built at once, on Christmas afternoon.

Either platinum or some super-secret new composite material developed by DARPA.

Each time I get into a toy store (which is every time I visit a shopping centre – the wife and I browse them the same way we browse bookshops) I look longingly at the Lego X-wing, Millennium Falcon and Death Star models, and try to convince myself I’m too old for toys.